A website that lists the victims of Righthaven LLC 'shakedown' lawsuits that are causing irreparable harm to bloggers and advocacy websites.

Righthaven LLC -- a bottom feeding legal outfit -- has teamed up with the Las Vegas Review-Journal and Denver Post to sue mom and pop websites, advocacy and public interest groups and forum board operators for copyright infringement. The strategy of Righthaven is to sue thousands of these website owners, who are primarily unfunded and will be forced to settle out of court.

To date Righthaven has been ordered to pay $323,138 in legal fees and sanctions.

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Call it ingenious, call it evil or call it a little of both: Copyright troll Righthaven is exploiting a loophole in intellectual property law, suing websites that might have avoided any trace of civil liability had they spent a mere $105.
That’s the fee for a blog or other website to register a DMCA takedown agent with the U.S. Copyright Office, an obscure bureaucratic prerequisite to enjoying a legal “safe harbor” from copyright lawsuits over third-party posts, such as reader comments.
There’s no better time to become acquainted with that requirement.

1 comment:

Don't webhosting companies have their agent of contact as an umbrella policy?

I know that wordpress.com has established it, so how can blogspot.com sites be sued (Shouldn't Google know this?)?

The "they shouldn't have to hunt around" argument is BULL, since Righthaven doesn't bother to do ANY contact. (all they do is WHOIS your domain registration information, if they're lucky, some sites openly state their name)